Paulo Coelho
Brazilian poet and writer.
Time neither moves nor is stationary. Time changes.
My aim is to understand love. I know how alive I felt when I was in love, and I know that everything I have now, however interesting it might seem, doesn't really excited me.
But love is a terrible thing: I've seen my girlfriends suffer and I don't want the same thing to happen to me. ... Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.
If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.
Life has been very hard on me, but, at the same time, it has taught me a great deal.
There's nothing deeper than love. In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the princesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.
I am going to sit here with you by the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you — until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.
You have two choices: to control your mind or to let your mind control you.
What did I do to deserve this?
At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.
I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.
The wise men understood that this natural world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect. God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom. That's what I mean by action.
Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.
Lord, preserve me from tragedy and I will follow your desires.
That is how I would have acted before my accident, but now my personal history had become unimportant. It had stopped being history and was once more becoming a legend, a search, an adventure, a journey into and away from myself. I was once more in a time which the things around me were changing and that is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my days.
Whenever I refused to follow my fate, something very hard to bear would happen in my life.
Every note leaves in each of us a memory, but it is the melody as a whole that tells a story, the story of someone wanting to get closer to another person and who keeps on trying, despite repeated rejections.
When she opened her eyes, Veronika did not think "this must be heaven". Heaven would never use a fluorescent tube to light a room, and the pain — which started a fraction of a second later — was typical of the Earth. Ah, that Earth pain — unique, unmistakable.
Love simply is. That is the testament of Athena or Sherine or Hagia Sofia — love is. No definitions. Love and don't ask too many questions. Just love.
I have only one certainty: there exists a parallel spiritual universe that impinges on the world in which we live. Apart from that, everything else seems absurd to me—sacred books, revelations, guides, manuals, ceremonies … and, what is worse, they appear to have no lasting effects.